Author Topic: Decoding Sarah Kane  (Read 8123 times)

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Offline Iain Fisher

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Decoding Sarah Kane
« Reply #1 on: September 05, 2007, 10:52:32 PM »
Don't forget Timo Pfaff's thesis "Decoding Sarah Kane- Dimensions of Metaphoricity in Cleansed"

www.iainfisher.com/kane/eng/sarah-kane-dad.html

For example:
"How does this go together with Sarah Kane’s Cleansed? No doubt, physical violence is the source domain. However, it will certainly not be an easy thing to figure out which meaning the violence tries to convey, or whether it tries to convey any meaning at all. The first observable entity with a metaphorical implication certainly is the setting. As the reader (not the audience) gets to know from the stage directions, the play takes place within the “perimeter fence of a university”. However, what is described as a university is actually the prison- and hospital-like realm of Tinker. Thus, the non-realistic setting is a blending of diverse settings existing in reality: prison, university, brothel, and hospital. Kane concocts a setting of implicated violence (prison), help (hospital), and learning (university) into a metaphorical location that can be interpreted as Kane’s sinister view of the world. Thus, the people living in it are prisoners and made dependent upon help and sources of knowledge of some external powers in society. “The spirit that hovers over it [Cleansed] is that of the philosopher Michel Foucault. Discipline and punish. The world is a prison, disguised as an educational institution, which trains you with the utmost brutality for nothing much else than dying” (Peter). Therefore, the underlying conceptual metaphor is “the world is a prison,” which is being blended with social institutions that are responsible for the individual’s mind and body and therefore have the ability to take away the individual’s autonomy over the self. Thus, an extended version would be “the world is a prison for mind and body,” which calls into mind similarities to a concentration camp."

Iain
« Last Edit: September 05, 2007, 10:54:46 PM by Iain Fisher »